Why we’re doing this zine: Penny’s version
Hi! I’m one of your blog mods and zine editors. We thought as part of the countdown to the submission we’d talk a little about why we’re doing this, and what this zine and the show mean to us. Here’s my reasoning:
I’m doing this because this show has given me a narrative so genuinely complex, exciting, and satisfying in a way that I am completely unused to as a queer person looking for queer stories. The breadth of queer experience in Black Sails, the complicated, thorny nature of queer relationships, the room the narrative allows for queer rage and sorrow and, ultimately, bittersweet, impossible joy is absolutely unprecedented, and I know I am not alone in feeling that way. Black Sails as a show unfolds as you watch it, starting in a shallow, shaky place and ending up somewhere challenging on an intellectual, philosophical, and emotional level and I want nothing more than to read endless explorations of it—so why not create a place for them to live?
I watched the whole show with the co-creator of this zine, and being able to discuss our experience of the show and the ways it made us grapple with our own queer experiences was a profound joy, not least because while we are both queer, we are queer in very different ways. This zine is an expansion of that experience—a way for you to grapple along with us with these characters, their relationships with one another and to their narrative, and the spaces they open for us to feel the long, wild history of our own queerness.
